Abstract
Previous studies have linked regional variation in willingness to engage in uncommitted sexual relationships (i.e., sociosexual orientation) to many different socio-ecological measures, such as adult sex ratio, life expectancy, and gross domestic product. However, these studies share a number of potentially serious limitations, including reliance on a single dataset of responses aggregated by country and a failure to properly consider intercorrelations among different socio-ecological measures. We address these limitations by (1) collecting a new dataset of 4,453 American men's and women's sociosexual orientation scores, (2) using multilevel analyses to avoid aggregation, and (3) deriving orthogonal factors reflecting US state-level differences in the scarcity of female mates, environmental demands, and wealth. Analyses showed that the scarcity of female mates factor, but not the environmental demand or wealth factors, predicted men's and women's sociosexual orientation. Participants reported being less willing to engage in uncommitted sexual relationships when female mates were scarce. These results highlight the importance of scarcity of female mates for regional differences in men's and women's mating strategies. They also suggest that effects of wealth-related measures and environmental demands reported in previous research may be artifacts of intercorrelations among socio-ecological measures or, alternatively, do not necessarily generalize well to new datasets.
Highlights
Some previous research suggests that environmental demands may be important for regional variation in individual mating strategies, such as willingness to engage in uncommitted sexual relationships
People in countries with higher parasite stress (Barber, 2008; Schaller & Murray, 2008; Thornhill, Fincher, Murray, & Schaller, 2010) or with higher incidence of low birth weight and child malnutrition, higher infant mortality rates, and shorter life expectancy (Schmitt, 2005) report being less willing to engage in uncommitted sexual relationships
In addition to scarcity of female mates and aspects of environmental demand, such as parasite stress and other health risks, people report being more willing to engage in uncommitted sexual relationships in wealthier countries (Schmitt, 2005)
Summary
Some previous research suggests that environmental demands may be important for regional variation in individual mating strategies, such as willingness to engage in uncommitted sexual relationships (i.e., sociosexual orientation, Simpson & Gangestad, 1991). These links between sociosexual orientation and environmental demands could occur because engaging in uncommitted sexual relationships increases exposure to infectious diseases and such behaviors will be more costly in more demanding environments (Schaller & Murray, 2008) They may occur because committed relationships reduce the negative consequences of demanding environments on offspring viability by increasing the amount of parental investment
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